4 Questions for an Expert: Israel’s Starvation of Palestinians in Gaza
Expert: Yara Asi, Assistant Professor, School of Global Health and Informatics at the University of Central Florida.
Question: Last week, the World Food Programme warned that hunger levels in Gaza had reached “astonishing levels of desperation,” noting that “About a third of the population are not eating for multiple days in a row.” Can you describe the current situation in Gaza in terms of hunger and malnutrition?
Yara Asi: For more than a year and a half, local officials and aid agencies have been warning about increasing hunger and risk of famine in Gaza due to Israel preventing the entry of food. Today, some of their worst predictions have become reality, as the global famine watchdog, the IPC, newly reports that the “worst-case scenario of famine is unfolding in the Gaza Strip.”
At least 147 Palestinians have died as a result of Israel’s starvation campaign, including 88 children. Many more have likely died but haven’t been documented, with the true toll unknown. Many people have come to hospitals - where doctors and other medical workers are suffering from hunger and malnutrition as well - exhausted, while others have collapsed in the streets.
The UN estimates that there are about 500,000 Palestinians in Gaza suffering from starvation. The World Food Programme estimates that almost 100,000 women and children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition and need treatment as soon as possible to avoid death. Last month, the UN warned that an estimated 55,000 pregnant women face growing health risks such as miscarriage, stillbirth and undernourished newborns.
Just last week, more than 100 humanitarian groups, including Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Save the Children, and Oxfam, released a statement warning of imminent “mass starvation” in Gaza. Many famine experts have estimated that a crucial “tipping point” has already been crossed, and the death rate will now increase quickly.
Indeed, countless images and videos on social media show nearly skeletal infants and children, insufficient and spoiled food rations, and people being shot and killed by Israeli soldiers just for the chance to retrieve desperately needed food at militarized, Israeli-controlled distribution sites.
Q: What does starvation and malnutrition like that Palestinians are experiencing now do to the human body?
YA: Past studies from sites of starvation, as well as images and data coming from Gaza today, show a host of outcomes—from low energy, peeling and flaking skin and nails, loss of hair, inability to sleep, swelling of the limbs and stomach, and a diminished immune system, to long-term increased risk for cardiovascular disease and cognitive decline. Malnourished pregnant mothers can pass these risks on to their baby, meaning that the effects of starvation are intergenerational.
Eventually, lack of feeding or continued inadequate nutrition (diets that lack vitamins, minerals, macronutrients, and electrolytes) can lead to organ failure and ultimately death. With a weakened immune system, others may die due to otherwise manageable infectious and other ailments.
For many in Gaza, especially children, even immediate refeeding will not undo the damage after experiencing severe malnourishment for months. The tragic reality is that for many of the children and babies starving in Gaza today, who have been living in some level of siege conditions for their entire lives, irreversible damage has already been done, if they survive at all.
Being deprived of adequate calories and nutrients during the crucial growth periods of childhood can result in stunted physical and mental growth that lasts throughout the lifetime. It leads to increased risk of cardiovascular disease throughout the lifespan and a permanently altered metabolism, along with impaired memory and learning ability. They may also have a permanently weakened immune system.
For adults who survive, they may be able to overcome more of the physical effects, but they will be left with psychological trauma that they may have to deal with for the rest of their lives. They are at increased risk of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other mental ailments.
Q: Experts have warned that Israel’s systematic trampling of international law, including its weaponization of hunger and food aid against the population of Gaza, and the international community’s failure to do anything meaningful to hold Israel to account, is destroying international humanitarian law and the legal order put in place after World War II to prevent crimes like those committed by the Nazis. What implications do you think Israel’s actions in Gaza and the international community’s failure to stop them will have in other parts of the world and for international humanitarian law in general?
YA: The implications are devastating—not just for Palestinians, but for people everywhere. If besieging a civilian population and weaponizing hunger against them, systematically destroying their food infrastructure and healthcare system, shooting at them at militarized aid distribution sites, and otherwise deliberately producing the conditions for mass starvation is acceptable, and carried out by a government that has made abundantly clear that its goal is ethnic cleansing and genocide, then the entire infrastructure of human rights, humanitarian law, and even just basic global norms have become meaningless.
Israel’s campaign of collective punishment, ethnic cleansing and territorial expansion - in both Gaza and the West Bank - has been going on for more than half a century and has been deemed illegal numerous times by the UN and International Court of Justice. There have been countless investigations finding grave, systematic human rights violations and evidence of war crimes.
None of this has led to any meaningful action of any kind, particularly on the part of the US and Israel’s other Western backers, without whose support Israel would not be able to commit these crimes. Israel’s genocide in Gaza today is only possible because of this seemingly endless impunity offered to Israel by the US and other Western governments.
Indeed, all marginalized people in the world today have even more to fear, with two years of confirmation that international law effectively no longer exists.
Q: On Sunday, following months of mounting international outrage and pressure, Israel said it will allow more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza and its military will begin daily “pauses" in three unspecified areas to facilitate aid distribution. According to Netanyahu, Israel will allow “minimal” amounts of aid in and the “pause” in its assault is “tactical.” Do you think this announcement is significant or just an attempt to deflect pressure while Israel continues to weaponize hunger and food to “concentrate” the population in the south, perhaps at a slower rate, ahead of possible expulsion out of Gaza entirely, as Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials have repeatedly declared is their goal?
YA: Just like President Biden’s failed “humanitarian pier,” the deadly airdrops that have been criticized by humanitarian organizations, and the entire so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” scheme, this move is merely a way to give Israel’s global backers a rhetorical offramp for what everyone can see clearly– that Israel is starving an entire population – to prevent them from taking any concrete action to stop it.
The “minimal” amount of food, water, and medicine that Israel will permit will be wholly insufficient to meet the baseline needs of the population, particularly considering the complete destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure and the fact that its people have been without medical care for nearly two years. Those suffering malnutrition today may need more than food– they need precisely designed treatments to fulfill vitamin, mineral, electrolyte, and fat deficiencies. Children suffering from serious damage due to hunger will need even more specialized care to recover. The idea that the solution to famine is a tiny increase in aid, sometimes, to some places, is absurd.
Further, Israel’s actions since October 2023 demonstrate that it does not respect any “humanitarian” pauses or “humanitarian zones” in Gaza. It has repeatedly bombed these areas during such “pauses” as well as designated humanitarian zones and the evacuation routes that displaced families were told to take to get to those zones. Israel has even bombed clearly marked and coordinated aid convoys.
As documented by multiple reports and statements accusing Israel of committing genocide, including the two released on July 28 by Israeli NGOs B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights - Israel, Israel is engaged in the systematic destruction of the Palestinian people and all of Israel’s actions should be viewed through this lens.
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